


Virgin & Child

by apollos



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Coda, Gen, Vignettes, post-episode, s10e6
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-23
Updated: 2016-02-23
Packaged: 2018-05-22 18:09:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6089587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apollos/pseuds/apollos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Scully receives a gift from the spaceship.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Virgin & Child

First she feels her heart beat so fast she is worried she’s having a heart attack and then it stops so suddenly she thinks, for just a second, she has died of shock. In reality, it’s panic, and she knows this, but there is a buzzing in her brain that might be the spaceship or just her own thoughts, all surfacing and mixing together like a river containing the souls of the dead swimming eternally.

Descending from the spaceship, taking up all of her sight, in a way that reminds her of that guy, Max, from all those years ago, suspended yet moving in the air, lit up by that effervescent blue light, is a teenage boy. She cannot discern the true color of his hair or his skin, but he seems freckled and auburn-haired, and she recognizes the eyelashes as Mulder’s, the wide eyes as her own, even though they are closed. A primal part of her soul leaps towards the figure.

William.

As if she has summoned him with her own thoughts.

Without thinking, she extends her arms and catches him. Mulder had told her that in his vision, he had seen the terrorist’s mother holding him as Mary had Jesus in the _Pieta_ , and that is what Scully feels like now. The Virgin holding her deceased son, dissembled from the cross, except that William is not dead, he is very much alive, quite possibly the most alive person on the planet at the moment.

His eyes flutter open. The blueness shocks her—they are the same as when she left him, the same as her own. Now she notices that the spaceship is gone, the only light source the sharp streetlamps, and William says, “Mom?”

* * *

 

 Scully passes off Mulder and William both to Einstein, who is hobbling and determined and followed by Miller, when they return to the hospital. She cannot handle it. She needs a second, or a moment, or perhaps a month alone, time to process.

The light in the hospital bathroom is yellow, one of the fluorescent tubes flickering. Scully braces the sink with both hands and looks at herself in the mirror. Her reflection flickers between her, Mulder, and William, her brain cataloguing his features, figuring out their origin. He has her mother’s hands, strong and delicate all at once, a washerwoman’s hands. She held them in one of hers on the way to the hospital.

“Where am I?” he had asked. “Who are you all?”

She told him as much as she could. He told her his adoptive parents were dead, that he was abducted from the hospital, where he’d been staring at their corpses and wondering why he hadn’t been infected himself.

* * *

 

It takes three days for Einstein, Miller and most of the other patients to recover, but a week for Mulder, after the stem cell administration. Scully pulls some strings, gets him a private room, and assigns herself as his personal doctor.

“Really, Scully,” he says, weakly, coughs punctuating his sentences. “I’m fine.”

Scully gives him a look as she readjusts his I.V.s, starts the process of taking his vitals. William, at her side, laughs.

“There’s a world out there to save,” Mulder tries again.

“I’m sorry, Mulder,” she says, wrapping a blood pressure cuff around his arm and shushing him when he tries to talk again. The color is back in his face, it’s the fourth day on the journey to his recovery. “It’s my turn to save the world.”

* * *

After a crash course in nursing, William begins to care for the sick. Scully watches him from several feet away, fretting for both him and the patients, plagued by the fear that he will insert a needle wrong or prick himself in the process. But William has all the natural bedside manner that Scully has struggled with all her life, and all of Mulder’s charm, making jokes and flashing smiles to put the ill at ease. He pulls his shaggy hair back in the smallest of ponytails, he covers his beautiful hands in gloves, rolls his scrubs up to expose his pallid, freckled arms. Scully’s heart breaks each time she looks at him, only to repair itself when he looks back at her.

Scully does not expect his childish clinging to both her and Mulder to last beyond the immediate crisis. She knows there will be resentment, questions, fights and tears. Doubts. She will have to explain so much, she will have to accept his inevitable confusion at her decision to give him up, she will have to attest to the fact that she and Mulder have become estranged, even though she kisses him goodbye every time she leaves the room on every part of his face, so grateful he is alive, so grateful that when she takes his pulse it is there, beating steadily beneath her fingers, on the screen.

But then William turns around and smiles at her, and it’s Mulder’s smile with her teeth, all neatly lined up and shining, and he falls asleep on her shoulder at night in Mulder’s room, and he lays his chin on Mulder’s chest and tells him the most mundane stories about his life, because that is all Mulder wants to hear. “Tell me about your first day of fourth grade,” Mulder will say, and William will furrow his brows just like Scully and say, “I don’t remember,” and Mulder will laugh and ask, “How about fifth?” and William will shake his head, his hair flinging around his ears, and Mulder will say, “How about sixth?” and William will perk, because he does remember, and he will launch into the story. And Mulder will smile and run his hand over William’s hair.

There are fifteen years of hurt between them all. Scully does not expect them to resolve this in this small, frenzied span of stolen time. She feels as if they are running on some other world’s clock, that time has finally been deconstructed. Scully does not know what they are going to do after this has passed, what new threats loom in the distance, though she has an idea, one of shady men smoking cigarettes in pressed suits in a dark room, sitting at a table and calmly discussing the annihilation of the human race. But: they have failed, for now.

In this aborted annihilation Scully has found all she has ever wanted, her boys reunited, cards she holds both shamefully and shamelessly close to her chest.      


End file.
